


Salvation

by oschun



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 06:16:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8360596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oschun/pseuds/oschun
Summary: A writing challenge with sylvanwitch  and jdax2002  to reinterpret a chapter of the book of Revelation. The false prophet stuff comes from Chapter 13.





	

“It is said that the first war, The Great War, changed our perception of ourselves. The philosophers, the poets and the prophets, those that document a truth deeper than the dustiness of dry facts, told us that we held the seeds of our final destruction deep within us. Those that paused to look saw the signs of our inevitable end in the great altars we built to the gods of war and greed. We created vast cities of concrete, steel and glass where the pounding of machinery echoed in our souls. We created in our own image and saw that it was good. 

Many, although not all, were surprised by how quickly the second war marched on the heels of the first. Afterwards, we promised never again and used our God-given intelligence to create complex technological systems that would keep us safe. We closed our borders and held onto what was ours. We closed the doors of our mortgaged homes and took care of our own, huddled together in solidarity before the blue, flickering screen that taught us how to live.

To avoid total annihilation we found new ways to wage war. A Cold War covered the earth like an ideological ice-age. Hot spots of poverty and division allowed the great powers to take childish pot shots at each other. The world was reduced to the sand box of two bullies. 

Nothing has any permanence in the angry heart of man. Alliances shifted, new enemies arose, frightful and terrible in their turbans and their talk of jihad. We battled, as always, over things we could have and hold, and over beliefs that are all the more precious to us because they are nebulous and abstract. 

The world was divided between East and West, and we forgot to notice that we shared the earth beneath our feet and the skies above. Our mother turned against us and now she refuses to feed her wayward children. We have torn aside her protective arms and exposed ourselves to the wrath of our father sun. 

We live in the time of woe. God’s angels have poured down their destruction on the earth and, as it was prophesied, a third of our world lies in ruin. The horsemen have been loosed and cut swathes through the human population. The dead ocean and her twin, the desert, eat away at the land. The kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and every free man hides in caves and among the rocks of the mountains (Rev 6:15). And here we are.

We no longer look across the waters to the east for our enemy. Our world has grown smaller once more. The beast has arisen in the South, within our own borders. We have come full circle. Civil war divides us and, once again, its roots lie in slavery. The beast has enslaved the people with his lies and false resurrection. He wears the scar of what should have been a fatal wound on his forehead and his disciples mark themselves in the same way to show their allegiance. His false prophet, Samuel, exercises the authority of the beast and performs great and miraculous signs--”

Dean leaves the cave when she starts on the false prophet. He isn’t going to wait around to hear her condemnation of his brother. He’s heard it all before. 

Her Joan of Arc rhetoric pisses him off anyway, although it’s more about the delivery than the content, the way she holds them mesmerized with the power that thrums through her body and voice, her face shining with conviction and pale skin glistening with sweat in the lamplight. Despite the cold of the cave, she wears only a thin t-shirt and jeans when she addresses her flock. She seems to burn with an internal fire. Hair clings to her neck in wet strands and her nipples protrude through worn, faded cotton. It gives him a hard-on, which pisses him off even more. It’s enough to make a man believe her detractors. Babylon, the great whore, their woman king. She has adopted the name with ironic delight and nobody owns up to remembering the name she was born with. 

He follows one of the tunnels to the surface. It’s quiet. Almost everyone is congregated in rapture before their Maid of Orleans in the central cavern. The guard at the exit looks like he’s going to try and stop him from leaving. Until he recognizes who it is. The guy runs a hand along his jaw, scowling at the memory of the last time they’d met like this. Dean smirks and raises an eyebrow. 

The rusted metal hatch opens with a clank. There will be no confrontation tonight, no need to prove again that he isn’t controlled by the rules that govern them down here. He’s a little disappointed. 

He fits the earphones of a walkman which he’d pieced together from old parts into his ears and pulls the hood of his coat over his head. He grins at the first strains of Black Sabbath’s Wicked World. 

The stone is still heated beneath his hands as he hauls himself up the rocky outcrop outside, but the air temperature is dropping fast and the frigid wind already needles the exposed skin of his face. His permanently chapped lips split open at the corners and he tastes blood in his mouth. 

His ass fits perfectly into the hollow of a boulder near the summit, a protective wall of stone surrounding him. It’s like he’s waited here, staring out to the South, for millennia and the stone has moulded itself around him.

He’d always loved the desert, driving through un-peopled arid landscapes used to make him feel free. Now he longs for the crowded green of woods and softly running water. 

Emptiness spreads out in front of him, the ever-encroaching sand covering most of what he can see in the angry red glow of sunset. An enormous fissure runs for miles ahead of him where the earth has been split open like an orange. The earthquakes seem to have come to an end but not before the countryside had been ripped open and whole cities swallowed into the abyss.

Sam is out there somewhere. 

His brother left in search of redemption after Dean’s selfish need drove him away. No. That isn’t the whole of it. At the back of his mind, Dean knows it isn’t only about what happened between them; there was something in Sam’s blood that called him South long before that terrible day. 

The last time he’d seen his brother was two months ago in half-glimpses of a tall figure between the heads of a chanting crowd. He’d barely recognized Sam’s pale, fanatical face. 

The run-down old theatre proved to be a fitting setting when Sam publicly exorcised a demon from a screaming woman. The beast had stood close behind Sam, watching him with an expression that made Dean want to scream aloud at how wilfully blind these people were. And of all the people on the earth, how could Sam, his smart, careful brother, not see what was right in front of him?

Standing in the crowd, he’d made an assassin’s choice. He would kill the beast, knowing that the mob would turn on him and rip him apart with their bare hands and that his brother would probably stand on stage and watch it happen. 

Hand clutching the .45 in his pocket, he’d tried to calm his breathing and steady the trembling in his legs. Whether it had been because he’d eaten nothing for two days or because of the effect of seeing Sam up there like some crazy snake-handling preacher - either way - he hadn’t been able to get himself under control. He’d known that he’d have missed the shot if he’d taken it.

His hyperventilating gasps of breath had started to attract the attention of the acolytes around him, so he’d run away. When he’d tried to track Sam down again, his brother had disappeared. 

He’d searched, but covering big distances has become difficult in this brand new world.

The red glow of the sunset fades and Black Sabbath starts to warble without batteries.

There is another way. That’s why he’s here. 

***

He’d gone to her, knowing all along that he would.

She opened her arms to him because she believed in love. She stroked his head like a mother and told him that love was not a sin, that he made it too complicated. Perhaps for a moment, he believed her. 

She asked him to stay, but he left when he found what he was looking for. 

A wise man who reminded him painfully of Bobby told him what he needed to hear, that it was possible to wash away the corrosion that ate a man alive from the inside. 

He fought his way for months across a scorched land he no longer recognized. Demons walked openly among them, and yet people, in their panicky desperation, remained the greater threat. 

The pale rider seemed to follow on his heels but something else did too, something safe and good that urged him on when he thought he’d falter. 

In the end it was easier than he’d thought. 

He slipped into a room of sleeping watchmen like he was invisible. In the yellow light of a sickly moon shining through the slats at the window, he stabbed a needle into his brother’s neck and hauled him out of the dark clutches of evil.

He’d spent so long alone in a bubble of infallibility that he was shocked by how difficult it was after that.

***

Sam woke up with curses in his mouth and evil in his eyes. 

“Get the fuck away from me,” he spat as Dean tried to dribble water into his mouth. 

“Sam, it’s me. Calm down.” Dean flinched when the colour of his brother’s eyes changed and shifted. 

Sam twisted his head around to look at the solid walls of the bunker and pulled at the restraints around his wrists, ankles and waist. He looked back up at Dean and spoke in a voice that sounded like his little brother waking from a nightmare to the reassurance of Dean’s presence. “Hey, Dean.” 

Dean smiled back, allowing the moment because he couldn’t help it. He stroked Sam’s cheek and almost broke when his brother turned his face into his palm. Dean closed his eyes for a moment and then wrenched his hand away.

Sam looked up at him, saw his knowing expression, and a nasty sneer twisted his features. Dean looked down at his brother’s demon and snorted in painful recognition. 

Eyes darkening, Sam’s voice dropped to a hot whisper, “Move that hand of yours lower why don’t you, brother, you know where it wants to be.” Dean stepped away, trying to ignore what the sin in his brother’s voice did to his body and his conscience. 

“Or has that whore you’ve joined forces with changed your mind about what you always thought you wanted?” Dean wouldn’t have thought it possible for his brother to wear the expression that distorted his features.

“You chose the wrong side, Sam,” he whispered as if the ghost of what had once been his brother might still be somewhere in the room.

The demon sniggered, “Because it wasn’t the side you chose, Dean?” 

He was tired of talking about allies and enemies. They were brothers. That was all. “You have about eleven pints of blood in your body, Sam,” he replied almost conversationally, picking up a syringe from the rusted counter against the wall. “I’m only going to drain about half of it.” 

The face looked like his brother’s again. “What? No, Dean, you’re not. Stop talking crazy.” It was the tone he used when Dean came up with a stupid plan that was bound to fail.

Dean leaned close and replied, “Yes, I am, Sam. It’s an infection in your blood, so, I’m going to take it out of you. I’m going to give you my blood, and either you’re going to get better or…”

“Or what, Dean?” the demon smirked up at him.

“Or we’re going to die here, Sam.” There was no inflection in his voice. In a way, he didn’t care anymore. 

Sam struggled when he pushed the needle in. Blood spattered on Dean’s arm and pooled in the bend of Sam’s elbow. Dean roughly pushed the needle further in then got scared that he’d gone through the vein. He hadn’t. The clear plastic of the bag started to fill with scarlet.

“Four pints out. Four in,” he muttered to himself, wiping away the red smear on Sam’s arm.

“What?” Sam gasped. “No, Dean, you can’t do that. You’re going to kill me.” His voice was high and panicky.

“How much do you weigh?”

“What? I don’t know. Please, let’s just stop and talk here for a minute, okay?” The voice of negotiation.

He wasn’t sure about the numbers, the weights and measures--the holy man at Babylon’s compound had been infuriatingly cryptic. “Are you sure you don’t know how much you weigh? You can lose about 40% of the blood in your body. That will weaken the virus, and then I can do the exorcism and blessing. Azazel wasn’t the first to try demonic infection but the lore isn’t very specific-”

“Dean, for fuck’s sakes. Will you listen to yourself? You haven’t thought this through. It’s a stupid idea. You’re just rushing into things, the way you always do.” 

That was probably true, but Dean wasn’t going to admit it. Sam had always been the ideas man in their partnership, and ironically he really wished he could have his brother’s perspective on this right now. But Sam wasn’t here. He was lost somewhere in his own body. Dean could only rely on himself. It was as good a plan as any. And if it didn’t work, well, at least he’d given it a shot. It wasn’t like there was anything to lose.

The blood bag had filled and he replaced it with another. He picked up a corroded silver chrismatory from his duffel and placed it on the stone platform next to Sam’s body, tied down like an altared sacrifice.

Sam was already starting to pale from blood loss and his skin felt cold and sweaty when Dean pushed his hair back from his forehead. “Why don’t you have the mark?” he asked, absent-mindedly stroking the hair back from Sam’s face.

Sam opened heavy-lidded eyes. “Because I have one of my own, Dean. Reach underneath me and feel where it connects me to you forever.” Dean was momentarily distracted by the intensity of memories. “You don’t want to do this, Dean. Let me up. What do you want, huh? I’m sorry I left. I’m here now.” 

“All this I will give you,” he quoted sardonically. “Mathew, chapter 4, verse 9. And here we are in the desert, Sammy, you and me. It’s not going to work, the temptation thing. I’ve gone for so long without anything that I can’t remember what it is to want.” It was a lie, but then so were most things. 

“You sound like a priest, Dean. It doesn’t suit you.”

“We all do, Sam. There are no non-believers left.” He dipped his finger into the holy oil and barely flinched when Sam hissed and writhed beneath his finger as he moved it in straight lines over his brother’s forehead. He tried to ignore the demon’s mocking words, his twisted re-telling of a stolen moment as he copied the vertical, then horizontal movements on to Sam’s chest, bared with a quick rip of fabric.

He resisted the urge to hit the smirking face beneath him, clenched his fist at his side, and ground out between clenched teeth, “Shut the fuck up, you son of a bitch. You know nothing.” 

“Oh, but I do, Dean. I was there, remember. When you ripped open Sammy’s shirt, when you--” 

He wasn’t strong enough and punched the leering face twice, hard enough to knock Sam out. Blessed silence filled the room. He took a deep breath, quickly dashed away the tears at the corners of his eyes, sank into a chair and pulled a rusted trolley closer. He shoved a needle into his arm and shouted at his brother’s unconscious body, “Fuck you. You know nothing. It wasn’t like that.” 

Sam regained consciousness too quickly. 

“Torture victims can grow to love their torturer, you know? There are studies; it’s called the Stockholm syndrome,” he whispered, sounding so much like the real Sam that it hurt more when he continued, “I love you, Dean. Do you enjoy hurting me?” The purpling bruise on his cheek stood out against the pallor of his skin. Dean felt a moment of panic…he wasn’t sure he could finish this. 

Sam suddenly turned his head away and gasped aloud. He began shivering, tremors running up and down his body. His chest was heaving, breath coming in sharp, ragged gasps. 

Dean leapt up, the needle still in his arm. His vision went white at the edges and he had to take a moment to allow the wooziness to pass. He was unsteady on his feet as he stood over his brother’s body and spoke the words of the modified exorcism. Sam’s convulsions got worse. Dean had no idea whether it was the result of the demon leaving his body or the physical effect of his blood loss. 

Dean quickly pulled out the needle that was draining his brother’s life force and applied pressure on the needle mark. He turned to grab a blood bag out of the rusted fridge hidden in a steel cabinet to the side. The generator had died a couple of hours ago and he wasn’t sure whether the blood he’d stored was still fresh enough. Even with what was running out his arm, he wasn’t sure there would be enough. He’d taken too much from Sam, but he’d had to be sure. 

He hooked up another IV, pushed a clean needle into Sam’s other arm and watched red slide down the tube and into his brother. He collapsed back into the chair and must have passed out for a few minutes. 

Awareness filtered back slowly. Sam had his face turned towards him, watching him. “Do you remember that summer when we were in Indiana? I was fourteen-” 

More demon tricks. “Shut up,” Dean growled.

Sam ignored the interruption. “I got really sick, had this fever that wouldn’t break. You wouldn’t leave me alone for like even a minute and you started driving me nuts. I shouted at you to get out the room. You left and…and the room was so empty without you. A room’s always empty without you in it.” Dean held his breath as he listened. Sam stared back at him, his eyes intense and familiar. “You came back a minute later with a cool, wet cloth that you put on my forehead. I was so glad you came back. Never said it though, you know?”

Dean smiled. It felt uncomfortable on his face, like the muscles around his mouth had forgotten how to move in a simple expression of happiness. Perhaps Babylon was right about love; it wasn’t really that complicated. He couldn’t think of another room he’d rather be in than this one right here. 

The world might be going to hell out there, but Dean could feel something else being born anew in this forgotten military bunker in the desert. Something that might be called hope or salvation. Life was not without irony.

He leaned forward and stroked Sam’s sweat-drenched hair back from his forehead. “We’re going to be okay, Sammy,” he whispered as his brother’s eyes closed and his chest started to rise and fall in the slow, steady rhythm of sleep.


End file.
